In this essay we will demonstrate that the role of project management in organisational change
processes is a mixture of rational and non-rational features. It is also colourful, difficult, interesting,
and messy.
We have named the paper "An Essay on". An essay means treating a topic freely from different
angles, although not forgetting the sources you used. The implication of this is that we are not able
or willing to make an encompassing study of the literature on project management3. We thus know
that many angles will not be covered. Furthermore we do not intend a make a negative delineation,
indicating what we are not dealing with. We prefer to make a positive delineation, emphasising
what we are going to take up in our essay.
Positively phrased we are inspired by 3 sources that will make the foundation for our different
angles:
1. Decision making theory (Enderud,1976)4. One of the authors has previously with success
applied decision-making theory as an approach for analysing organisation change processes
5. Both authors have followed the same line in analysing organisational changes in
the Danish public sector6. That success has inspired us to re-use the distinction between
rational, political and anarchic processes in this essay 7. Enderud (1976:21-22) excludes
explicitly the role of the actors’ participation in his presentation of decision models. We
find, however this aspect so important that we have decided to include it
2. Buchanan and Boddy´s analysis of the character of change8: The authors characterise the
change project in to dimensions. One pertains to the activities concerned: Are we dealing
with peripheral or core activities of the organisation. The second dimension deals with the
magnitude of the change. Buchanan and Boddy use the scale: incremental - radical9.
Furthermore Buchanan and Boddy makes a useful distinction between "public
performance" (on stage) of rationally considered and logically phased and visibly
participative change and "backstage activity" in the recruitment and maintenance of support
and in seeking and blocking resistance (ibid p.27)
3. We will apply data from our own case studies. We will use a format that we call an
illustration, thereby indicating that we "only" illustrate a point. We do not prove it10. Our
cases are almost all from the public sector or from trade unions. Most of them have been
published elsewhere.

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In this paper, Mie Augier provides a rich description of the intellectual traditions, the signifi-cant people and academic institutions that in some way or another made a difference to Davis Teece’s own intellectual development. In this sense, it is a dynamic account of the emerging career of a distinguished scholar - but not only that. It is also a description of the co-development of three major disciplinary fields; organization theory, economics and strategic management during three decades or so. David Teece has made several important contribu-tions, perhaps most notably to economics (on the theory of the firm and transaction cost eco-nomics) and strategic management (on dynamic capabilities) while drawing upon organization theory and notions such as organizational routines and bounded rationality. In addition, Augier also provides an interview with David Teece, a true scholar still unsettled with what has been achieved so far - in all three fields: "Maybe I’m wrong; and maybe technology is a special case and maybe technology and organization do not belong at the core of the theory of the firm. My intuition tells me otherwise." (David Teece, quoted in this issue).

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Purpose: Very little research has been done to find out what happens to organizing in Chinese companies that are located in countries characterized by cooperative capitalism. I focus on this phenomenon and explore what happens to organizing in two Chinese high-tech companies located in Denmark.
Design/methodology/approach: Case studies, interviewing, and three questions inspired by the work of Boltanski & Thévenot: 1) What type of test scenarios are the Chinese and Danes becoming engaged in? 2) Which worlds are called upon as justification of actions by the Chinese and Danes in the test scenarios? 3) How do they discover their relative worth in different worlds enacted in the test scenarios?
Findings: The analysis shows that controversies have emerged in test scenarios where Chinese managers and engineers have enacted a market world and a domestic world, while Danish managers and engineers have enacted an industrial world and a civic world. Furthermore, it is suggested that controversies also occur when Chinese managers enact a fuzzy world. Different worlds collide in these types of test scenarios, creating ambiguity about the worth of the persons involved and the organizing principles in their practices. The Chinese and the Danes deal with the ambiguity in many different ways.
Research limitation: Few cases exist and the data is limited.
Practical implications: The analysis creates learning opportunities for Chinese and Danish managers and highly qualified employees.

In the recent years the successful collaborative arrangements and relationships between university, industry and public institutions have become a mantra in transforming new scientific knowledge into new innovations and business ventures. The fit between these very different actor groups has been treated as a contingent factor. However only little attention have been giving to a specific focus on the strategies that new business ventures have obtained to establish the fit between small firms, university research, and public policies such as regulatory policies and R&D policies. The emergence of the new biotechnologies and these techniques predominately coming from the university sector make the new biotechnology organizations an interesting object for studying these relationships both on a regional and a national level.
From the perspective of the small biotechnology firms (SBFs) the paper explores four different strategies for dealing with network relations; the research oriented strategy, the incubator strategy, the industrial partnering strategy, and the policy-oriented strategy. The research-oriented strategy is narrowly focusing on how a biotechnology firm transforms their scientific results into promising technologies, services or products. The incubator strategy is concerned with localization and how to come about specific types of managerial problem in the initial stage of forming a business venture. The industrial partnering strategy concerns how to overcome the problem of bringing the technologies from an experimental stage at a research lab to be able handle industrial processes and full-scale production. Last but not least the policy oriented strategy focus on problem of having products approved by the public authorities.
Theoretically the article draws upon network theories and a dynamic view of network relations. That is done in order to capture the nature of the relationships between different types of actors, but also in order to emphasize the informal nature of some of these relationships.
The article has a dual purpose; 1) From a corporate point of view to emphasize multiple conditions for developing and forming interorganizational relationships, 2) From a research perspective to point to the diversity and heterogeneity of these relations and thereby emphasizes the evolutionary nature of these relations and their relatedness to the overall strategies obtained by the biotechnology entrepreneurs.
The paper is structured so it will start out by stating its methodological foundations. Thereafter the theoretical positioning of the network approach will seek to argue that we have multiple network relationships are at play. Not only do these networks differ but also the institutional and organizational origins are to be touched upon to come to understand the nature of the biotechnology environment and the actors involved. The positioning of the SBFs as the focal point of the analysis leads to a discussion on entrepreneurial business strategies in biotechnology industry and how these business strategies in a very distinct mode is correlated with interorganizational relationships. The empirical evidence will be fleshed out in four cases representing each of the four suggested strategies. The conclusion discusses three implications of network partnering analysis. First, it discusses the theoretical contributions on the diversity, heterogeneity between the four partnering strategies. Second, it will point to future directions in the research. Third, the conclusion will point to the managerial challenges that can be foreseen.

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This inquiry is about patient safety. More specifically, it is an inquiry into the
relationship between the contemporary patient safety policy programme and the
structures of medical reasoning, the conduct of healthcare professionals, and the
character of the clinical situation that it seeks to influence. The international
programme, which has become increasingly dominant since its inception by the
American Institute of Medicine Report To Err is Human (Kohn et al. 2000), is built
equally on a number of political rationalities and specific technological solutions. As
an ideology, the programme introduces new ways of talking about and acting upon
medical error. Under the headline of systems thinking, organizational learning, and
‘non-blame’, errors are now described as ‘adverse events’ or ‘critical incidents’ and
the clinician is understood as the second victim of the error, of which the patient is
the first victim. These efforts are closely linked to the technical ambitions of the
programme, which involves the introduction of non-sanctioning incident reporting
systems, incident analysis tools, and a wide range of safety systems and procedures
that are all conceived of from a dominating idea of preventability: The idea that by
diminishing variation and increasing standardization, the risk of error can be
eliminated and errors can be prevented. In this way, the programme can be said to
be dominated by an organizational myth of failsafe systems. By adopting ‘a
pragmatic stance’ and via fieldwork conducted in Danish healthcare settings, this
dissertation tracks and challenges the key assumptions on which the programme and
its dominant myth are founded.

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In
recent
years,
research
collaboration
between
academic
and
corporate
scientists
has
become
a
matter
of
concern
for
policy
makers
as
well
as
research
managers
in
academia
and
industry.
Often,
both
in
public
research
policies
and
in
university
and
company
strategies,
science-industry
collaboration
has
been
presented
as
a
catalyst
for
advancing
science
for
the
benefit
of
society
as
well
as
for
the
involved
collaborators.
The
same
policies
and
strategies,
however,
often
emphasize
that
science-­industry
collaboration
is
difficult
and
demanding
due
to
inherent
and
often
incommensurable
differences
between
the
respective
goals
and
processes
of
academia
and
industry.

The aim of this dissertation is to identify how ideas of organisational development
are incorporated into and employed in hospital departments. The dissertation focuses
on the conceptions of professional identity among doctors and nurses, their
conceptions of clinical practice and the ideas of development they are introduced
to.
The health professionals’ conceptions of development and practice are connected
to their perception of ‘professional relevance’ in the dissertation. This conception
of ‘professional relevance’ thereby forms a recurring expression of conceptions
among the actors.

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The article is an empirical analysis of how a Scandinavian new economy firm was able to persuade a number of business journalists that it represented ‘the future’. It analyses how visitors to the firm were met with a specific and persuasive combination of rhetorical and material ressources. It suggests that the persuasive power of the firm was based on its ability to evoke and articulate a series of pointed contrasts between the attractive working life within the firm and the ordinary and problematic work life elsewhere. The article suggests that this strategy of drawing contrasts together differs from the mode of persuasion usually described by STS.
Keywords: Sociology of expectations, Sociology of futures, Sociology of anticipation, New Economy, dot-com, persuasion, power, actor-network theory, materialised contrast argument.

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Toward an Alternative Epistemology for Gender Research in Organizations

Ellehave, Camilla Funck(København, 2004)

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Abstract:

"How becoming!" we say (though often with a subtle ironic twist) when someone says or does something that we find is suitable or appropriate for him- or her or the situation in which he or she is. And while it may be old-fashioned, the phrase is also used when the clothes people are wearing make them look attractive. By pronouncing: ‘how becoming!’ we condone the appearance, the saying or the doing by making a reference to the appropriateness of somebody’s attire, words and deeds. However, the appropriateness is situated in that it is based on cultural conventions of a particular time and space, and simultaneously produces culturally accepted boundaries around what denotes culturally intelligible identities or subject positions (parallel to suggesting that something is "for the likes of you/us" versus "not for the likes of you/us" (Bourdieu, 1990:55-56)).

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What has power to do with Human Resource Management (HRM)? Perusing HRMtextbooks
one will find, that power as a concept, only seldom is approached explicitly.
When the subject of power is addressed directly, it is primarily as a question of
bargaining power between organisation and labour market institutions, the power of a
leader or person in terms of the right to execute punishment and the duty to obedience
or empowerment, as a countermove to the effects of bureaucratic workplace routines
"... where initiative is stifled and workers become alienated"1. Indirectly one can
identify power as interesting in the HRM-literature, as a question of influence or status
of HRM as a function in business. Does or does HRM not play a central role in
business? Is HR part of top management? That is questions concerned with how power
is distributed as a commodity in reality.
This paper is taking up the concept of power as a distributing force of reality, as
opposed to a distribution of commodities in reality. In this way the position on power
adopted is similar to the in Deleuzes words very simple definition of power by
Foucault: "Power is a relation between forces, or rather every relation between forces
is a ‘power relation." (Deleuze 1999: 70). This way of conceptualising power has as a
consequence, that power always has several sides:
Power is not essentially repressive
Power is not unilateral, but requires both "masters and mastered"
Power is practiced more than it is possessed.
The first point is serving as both the way in and the way out of this paper. The paper
will pry at the workings of power in order to unfold power as a positive as well as
repressing force using HRM as the practice where power is working. "The exercise of
power is a "conduct of conducts" and a management of possibilities" (Foucault, 2000:
341) Consequently, the way to study power is not to try to "find it", but to see, how it is
practiced. (Deleuze, 1999: 71) Studying power in HRM therefore becomes a question
on grasping the power relations and force fields emerging from HRM-practice. One
could therefore ask the question: "What is HR about – and what is HR practice?"
Barbara Townley (1994, 1998, 1999) has done this extensively and demonstrates how a
foucauldian analysis focuses on practices, which structure social relations. (Townley,
1998: 194) Townley conceptualizes HRM as the medium through which the
employment relationship may be organized or disciplined through technologies of the
self.